The once great animation studio continues its fall with Elemental, another clumsy Pixar parable about the joy of finding a career.
Still from Elemental. (Pixar)
Pixar’s new film Elemental is so boring and unmemorable that it seems like a new low for the famed animation company. That’s impressive, considering that Pixar has already had quite a fall from it’s early glory days, slavishly following Disney Studios down the money-grubbing rathole, ruining its sterling reputation through bad sequels, cynical merchandizing, and a general anything-for-a-buck mentality.
I’m no fan of the Pixar style myself — too much ideologically poisoned Disneyfied nostalgia and sentimental slop weighing down fantastically talented animators — but even I can appreciate the more dazzling aspects of Toy Story (1995), The Incredibles (2004) Ratatouille (2007), and Coco (2017).
But Elemental, directed by Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur), is shockingly formulaic. It seems Sohn based the film’s premise on his own experience as the son of Korean immigrants, who ran a store in the Bronx in the 1970s. But even so, it’s impossible not to recognize that the Elemental narrative is a tired, retreaded variation on Inside/Out (2015). That Pixar film portrayed the basic emotions as contending characters representing Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. Their tech job is to manage via computer consoles the emotional life of a young girl, within the complex social system of her being.
In the Elemental variation of this idea, the basic natural elements of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air are anthropomorphized as characters trying to live harmoniously together in Element City. Fire beings are the newest immigrants, and they’re not fully accepted in society, especially by the richest class of Water beings.
There’s a cross-class romance involving fiery Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis) with lugubrious Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie). Her big trouble is her immigrant father, Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen), and his legacy of hardship in leaving his overheated home country and running a store in the rough working-class neighborhood of Element City. His dream is that Ember will eventually inherit the store and run it. And though she works maniacally hard, she can never quite measure up.
She’s always causing inadvertent chaos when her angry emotions get the best of her, setting inconvenient fires. This turns out to be because running the store is the wrong kind of work for her. She’s really meant to create glassmaking artworks, channeling her ability to concentrate heat. It’s Wade and his rich Water family whose upper-class connections provide her that opportunity with a fancy glassmaking internship.
Still from Elemental. (Pixar)
But the overall lack of inventiveness in Elemental means that these heavy ideological themes come across clumsy and didactic. The characters themselves are less engaging than in many other Pixar films. There’s a total absence of any truly dazzling visual effects, and the script isn’t particularly funny or moving, so you’re free to notice what a weird-ass story this is for an animated film. What do Fire and Water, Earth and Air, have to do with another tale of work and professional advancement?
But Pixar films are so often about characters’ working lives in complex social systems resembling human communities (mainly cities) that it seems like the studio’s storytelling talent veers automatically toward those narratives. Not only are they exhaustingly plotty but they normalize the idea of work as the essential fact of all life, supposedly what every entity on earth does all the time. Toy Story began it all the way back in 1995, with a plot about the way toys work at being the playthings of human children, and attend corporate-style meetings run by busy managers bearing clipboards, cautioning employees about their performance levels. In Monsters, Inc., all the monsters work in a factory trying to hit peak performance levels as “Top Scarers” by terrifying children at night, because kids’ screams power the city of Monstropolis.
I love Ratatouille, directed by Brad Bird — it’s my favorite Pixar film — but I gotta admit it’s all about work and achievement and professional success. In this story, it’s not enough for Remy the Rat (Patton Oswalt) to overcome intense prejudices against him as he tries to become a chef in Paris — he needs to become a top chef, with his own restaurant, and a big rep. And the human characters of Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano) and Colette Tatou (Janeane Garofalo) have to find their own levels of work proportionate to their talents — Alfredo can’t cook at all, so he becomes a waiter in Remy’s new restaurant, and Colette becomes Remy’s sous-chef.
And the food critic Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole) is despised as a villain because critics don’t work, see, they just critique the work of others. Anton Ego is only redeemed when he’s converted by Remy’s brilliantly inventive cooking and strives to serve that talent. He invests in Remy’s new restaurant, as both a great business opportunity and a recognition of truly worthy work done at the highest level.
Propaganda much, Pixar? That’s a plot turn worthy of mad right-wing novelist Ayn Rand. Pixar also inherits the pro-work mania from Disney itself, of course. In Disney films — imbued with the old Uncle Walt’s punitive Protestant work ethic that made him such a bitter enemy of labor unions and his own suffering workforce — not working obsessively hard is regarded as morally dangerous. That’s even if (especially if) animated characters find themselves living in paradise where the weather is perfect and the food falls off the trees and there’s no sane reason to work. A straight line can be drawn from the siren song “Bare Necessities” in Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967) to “Hakuna Matata” in The Lion King (1994). In both cases, the young male protagonist is temporarily swayed by likable but lazy sidekicks who want them to ignore their responsibilities, which involve huge, generally life-endangering, effort.
If you don’t think animated films can work any other way than the Disney/Pixar narrative models, just throw your mind back to the hugely popular Bugs Bunny cartoons that played before feature films in theaters in the 1930s through the ’50s. Guess how those tend to start? With Bugs Bunny happily living in his hole in the ground, probably reclining luxuriously while eating a carrot, or possibly strolling in the greenery singing an amusing song, until hunter Elmer Fudd or some other malefactor comes bothering and chasing and threatening him. Then the battle begins for Bugs’ freedom to do nothing but enjoy himself in nature.
It doesn’t have to be all work all the time, but nobody’s told the top talent at Pixar.